Is Tony Abbott's regime the worst federal government ever?

Its inability to pass meaningful legislation is just one of many areas where the government has substantially failed.

By Sally Young

Updated4 August 2015 — 8:36pmfirst published at 8:28am

The Abbott government has been in power 686 days and, in the wake of a turbulent half year capped off by the Bronwyn Bishop expense scandal, it is a valid time to ask a question that is often debated online and among political scientists. Is this the worst federal government ever?

I'm talking here about the effectiveness of the Abbott government. Can it pass legislation? Perform administration? Do Australians judge it to be effective? I'm not trying to make value judgments about whether it is a morally "good" government or whether its policies are good or bad (readers will have their own views).

To work out how effective the Abbott government has been in terms of legislating, I'm drawing upon data prepared by Nick Evershed​ for TheGuardian two years ago that I've updated with the Abbott government's performance. This method takes all the Commonwealth of Australia Numbered Acts and assigns them to a government based upon the act's date of assent. It then counts total acts for each government and divides them by the number of days it was in office to arrive at a rate of acts per day that accounts for different lengths in a government's tenure.

This isn't a perfect measure because a bill might be introduced under one prime minister and passed under the next; and a lot of legislation is routine, technical amendments. This approach also values quantity over quality and doesn't measure how important the legislation was or its impact. But it does show one key performance indicator we would expect of a government: that it can pass legislation.

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Illustration: John Spooner

On this criterion, the Abbott government is the least efficient government of the past 44 years. Even William McMahon's government of 1971-72 passed more legislation – and McMahon is often dubbed Australia's worst prime minister.

To date, the Abbott government has passed just 0.372 acts per day since it came to office, compared to 0.438 for the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments (and Gillard had to contend with minority government), 0.452 during John Howard's tenure, 0.476 for Paul Keating, 0.491 for Bob Hawke's governments, 0.481 for Malcolm Fraser, 0.472 for Gough Whitlam, and 0.436 for McMahon. Barring some unexpected burst of productivity in the latter half of this year, the Abbott government is on track to have the worst record for passing legislation since the late 1960s.

Legislative malaise may help explain why some key statistical indicators relating to health, education, poverty, Indigenous Australians, women's progress and home ownership, show the Abbott government has conspicuously failed to make progress. The Abbott government may have "stopped the boats" and repealed the carbon tax but these are not policy measures that have a demonstrably big impact upon the lives of ordinary Australians.

The Abbott government's failure to implement so many of its own pre-election promises has contributed to a perception of it as an inefficient government. It has also experienced some very public reversals and botches on policy, including the Medicare co-payment, delaying payments for unemployed young people, cuts to the age pension, race discrimination law, jobseekers applying for 40 jobs a month, deregulation of higher education, and Tony Abbott's signature paid parental leave policy.

On one key performance indicator, the ability to pass legislation, the Abbott government is the least efficient government of the past 44 years.Credit:Michele Mossop

The unexpectedly harsh budget of 2014 is likely go down in Australian political history as the worst received federal budget and especially because, unlike "horror" budgets of the past, all the pain inflicted didn't even achieve what it was intended to do – it didn't reduce the deficit. Gross debt jumped from $59 billion in June 2008 (or 5 per cent of GDP) to about $430 billion by June this year (26.3 per cent of GDP). The Commonwealth's debt-to-GDP ratio is now at the highest level since the ABS's quarterly records began nearly 30 years ago.

Opinion polls can't tell us how effective a government is but they can indicate how effective people perceive it to be. When a government is delivering policies that improve people's lives, this is usually reflected in high public confidence. The Abbott government had the worst opinion poll start for a new government in 40 years, and no government ended its first year in a more precarious electoral position since Whitlam's turbulent period in office. Last month's Newspoll was the 26th consecutive result to show an ALP lead in two-party-preferred terms.

Even Billy McMahon's government of 1971-72 passed more legislation – and McMahon is often dubbed Australia's worst prime minister.

As prime minister, Abbott has been unusually unpopular. According to Newspoll results (available since 1987), he has not yet beaten Keating's lowest approval rating of 17 per cent, which Keating obtained in August 1993. But, in February this year, Abbott's approval rating was only 24 per cent. His personal approval rating also dropped into negative territory much faster than other leaders, after just months in office. For the past 15 months, more voters have disapproved of the way Abbott is doing his job than approved. With the exception (again) of Keating, voters turned off Abbott faster than any prime minister in more than 40 years of Nielsen polls.

Equally worrying for a Liberal government, surveys such as Dun & Bradstreet's Business Expectations Survey and the Deloitte quarterly CFO Survey conclude that business confidence is also low, with business leaders reporting that the Abbott government's performance is hurting consumer and business confidence.

The Abbott government is on track to have the worst record for passing legislation since the late 1960s

Abbott's personal judgment has been regularly called into question. His own use of travel entitlements, the knighthood debacle, his doomed paid parental leave promise, his elevation of only one woman to cabinet, and his misplaced loyalty to Bronwyn Bishop, have dismayed or angered the public, and often led his own colleagues to question his leadership. Abbott escaped a leadership challenge this year only 17 months into his prime ministership.

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Of course, the worst thing a leader can do is to be ineffective, unpopular, have no coherent, policy program, a lame legislative record and then lose office. This final election test will be the one that determines whether Abbott is remembered as the 21st century's William McMahon.

Sally Young is an Age columnist and associate professor of political science at The University of Melbourne.